Straight Talking From Andrew Leigh of Maynard Leigh Associates

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Approximate reading time: 1.6 secs

Recently I was in hospital for a major operation and was asked afterwards during my week of enforced stay: “How would you rate your pain on a scale of 1 to 10, one being hardly any and 10 being unbearable?” 

Happily my scores seldom reached more than four or five during that post operative week. Meanwhile, two beds away a young man, also post operative, regularly declared his pain to be on the scale of 8, 9 or even 10. Each day though, he bravely walked around the ward only occasionally giving a moan or any sign that he was suffering terribly. 

That was when I began realising just how subjective and individualised scaling can be. There was no realistic way you could for example, combine my score of 4 out 10 with his pain at eight or nine. No “average” would make sense or provide much useful information to anyone. 

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Each month a leading HR practitioner is invited to answer a tough question posed by Andrew Leigh. This month we welcome: Jacqeline Davies, Former Group Head of Talent & Executive Resourcing at Lloyds Banking Group.

Question: Apart from coping with the recessionary climate, what in your view is the most important issue now facing HR and HR practitioners and why?

Jacqueline says:

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Approximate reading time: 3.4 minutes

For many managers, and not just ones in HR, the prospect of dealing with people’s emotions is a pain. Not because they do not respect people’s emotions simply that handling them is messy, unpredictable and ultimately seemingly far removed from the world of analysis and the bottom line.
 

Daniel Shapiro, writing in Harvard Business Review on line[1] argues that: emotions can be both good and bad for business. They stem from five core sources he argues: appreciation (recognition of value), affiliation (emotional connection to others), autonomy (freedom to feel, think, or decide), status (standing compared with others), and role (job label and related activities).

 
By addressing those concerns proactively Shapiro claims you can steer a potentially negative conversation to a positive place and thus extract greater cooperation from your superiors, colleagues, and reports.
 

Approximate reading time: 3.3 mins

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Do really clever people need a special kind of management? If so, what is it and how does it differ from what the rest of employees receive?

Authors Rob Goffe and Gareth Jones, who launched the provocative question that regularly reduces executives to a stunned silence: “Why should anyone be led by you?” have produced a new book called Clever.

It explores the implication of leading your smartest, most creative people—those with special skills or talent. Of course this raises fundamental questions such as those listed above and not everyone would agree with the authors’ assertion that the Clevers, as they call them, need handling in a special way.

Capitalism, raw in tooth and claw is alive and well and living in the world of mergers and acquisitions. Slavery now outdated also seems to retain a sort of half life through M&As.

Take the Cadbury bid by Kraft. The former is a company with a long and distinguished history of not merely profitability but socially responsible behaviour. Along comes a predator who decides that Cadbury’s time has come and it will gobble up the firm in the interest of yet more profits. 

The people who make up Cadbury, the employees, laughingly termed stakeholders in various descriptions of what constitutes a company, are not expected to have any say in whether Nestle takes over their company. These people are in effect “bought and sold” in an echo of harsher times when slavery meant something rather worse.